Meet Jordan, an experienced Project Director working in our Integrated Transport sector.
Jordan believes the power of Costain's collaborative culture allows her team to solve complex infrastructure problems efficiently and safely.
What led you to your career at Costain?
After moving to the UK from New Zealand, I was primarily focused on broadening my experience working on as many interesting construction projects as possible.
I first worked with Costain as a freelancer as part of the Costain Skanska joint venture (JV) delivering enabling works for HS2 at St James’s Garden. Two years later, I rejoined Costain to work on the A40 Westway project, and this provided me with opportunities for both technical and leadership development, including the challenge of building and mentoring a new team. I returned to Costain as its culture is one that closely aligns with my own values.
How does your role contribute to improving people's lives?
As engineers building new or upgrading critical national infrastructure, I firmly believe our work improves people’s lives. That might involve improving transportation links to make daily life just that little bit easier, making journeys safer, or delivering value-for-money infrastructure solutions for our customers.
At the same time, engineers are able to make improvements to the environment by weaving sustainability into decision-making. For example, during the Gallows Corner Flyover Refurbishment, we made a conscious decision early in the design stage to ensure none of the existing trees in the construction area were removed. This, along with our other activity, resulted in the project achieving a positive Biodiversity Net Gain score of 13%.
What's your biggest professional achievement and why?
Working on the Transport for London framework has filled me with a huge amount of pride. Our high-performing team of engineers, designers and construction experts was brought together from a range of different parts of Costain, united by a shared vision of delivering the best results in a highly complex, live network environment. Seeing the team grow from strength-to-strength, develop in their roles, and learn new skills has been a real privilege. I’m exceptionally proud of them.
I’m also really excited to be leading the frameworks for Costain’s involvement in critical updates at the Port of Dover and Gatwick. Our work at Dover will involve refurbishing and replacing a range of different utilities serving the port, with a big focus on asset optimisation and decarbonisation. And at Gatwick, we’re delivering a range of capital projects to upgrade and modernise the airport’s infrastructure, which will go a long way towards building resilience in response to growing passenger demand at the UK’s second busiest airport.
What do you enjoy most about working at Costain?
I love finding the best solution to help overcome our customers’ constraints. I’m fortunate enough to work with incredibly talented teams and people with a huge amount of technical knowledge for me to tap into, but what sets us apart is our collaborative culture. We are able to work together to define what success looks like and how can we solve complex problems efficiently and safely.
What have you learned during your time at Costain?
There is a constant need to deliver better, smarter and more creative solutions to maintain network or productivity requirements for our customers. Fortunately, at Costain, the access we have to our subject matter experts is fantastic.
Through the works on at Gallows Corner and the A40 Westway project, I have gained a deeper understanding of Costain’s broad and deep in-house design and engineering capabilities, particularly relating to modular structures and carbon management. Teams from this part of the business worked closely with us and quickly dealt with onsite change and challenges to provide the client with valuable engineering solutions and design alternatives when needed. Everyone working together and bringing different skillsets to the table creates an infectious energy and real ‘buzz’ on site.
What advice would you give to someone starting out in their career?
Give everything a go. I’ve managed to gain a very broad experience of the construction industry and that’s down to being open to giving any job a try. Ask lots of questions and always find someone in the team you admire and can learn from.
Connect with Jordan on LinkedIn or search our careers page to learn about our current job opportunities.